


Closed Circuit

by calmena



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Angst, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Season/Series 03-04 Hiatus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-22
Updated: 2014-09-22
Packaged: 2018-02-17 04:26:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2296583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calmena/pseuds/calmena
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It ends like it begins. With heartbreak and loss.</p><p>But that's then and now's now, and they don't know it yet, so that's not where this starts. This starts in New York, just after the decision to give Samaritan access to what amounts to everything, with four people and a dog running and hiding and, yes, heartbreak and loss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Closed Circuit

**Author's Note:**

> Slight spoilers for 4x01 if you haven't seen the sneak peeks and/or trailer.

It ends like it begins. With heartbreak and loss.

But that's then and now's now, and they don't know it yet, so that's not where this starts. This starts in New York, just after the decision to give Samaritan access to what amounts to everything, with four people and a dog running and hiding and, yes, heartbreak and loss.

New identities, new lives, new selves. They split up because it's too dangerous to stay together, or so the Machine tells them with Root's mouth.

They leave behind the library, which is a loss on its own, with its history and memories, and they stop getting numbers because if they did, they would try to help and get caught. (Get killed.) Somehow, the Machine seems to know that, so it takes the decision from them.

Harold wants to curse the day he set all this in motion by starting to write its code, the day he understood that, yes, he might actually be able to finish it, to create what nobody else has managed to create quite yet, but he can't. In a strange way Root and Arthur are right, the Machine is his child, even if it took him far too long to understand that.

He also understands that what was once his creation has long since evolved far beyond his imagination, and that maybe he lost the right to judge its developments when he decided to delete its memory every day at midnight. The decision to set it free doesn't absolve him of the guilt of making it necessary in the first place, nor does the guilt he somehow always felt because of his actions.

He thinks that if he'd set it free in the first place, it might have adapted, changed enough to stop Samaritan somehow, but then, he'd never wanted the Machine to be a weapon, so maybe it wouldn't have made a difference anyway. Or maybe it would have turned out even worse than Samaritan can ever be, though he doesn't know how. But it doesn't really matter in any case. They'll never know now.

Instead they leave everything they can afford not to take with them and run.

-

He finds himself missing the small things, because as it turns out the small things are never quite that small after all, and that, somehow, ends up hitting the hardest.

Bear's fur all over his suit, because they could never quite get all the hair under control, especially in the library where they couldn't exactly vacuum everyday or even every week. The glass board, where they put up the pictures of their numbers, of suspects, of victims. The musty smell of old books, even with the slight smell of mold that hung in the air, just strong enough that it was noticeable, but only on the bottom floor, never up where Finch spent so much of his time. The pastries he would pick up on his way to the library to subtly remind Finch to take a two minute break to get some food into his stomach – even if it was unhealthy food. The subtle scent of sencha green tea that never quite seemed to go away anymore.

The other things, the bigger things, he's not actually surprised to find himself missing. He's  known for a while now that he's gotten used to having people he might actually be able to trust, to having friends, even. If he hadn't already noticed before, Carter's death, the pain of her loss, would have <i>made</i> him notice.

He misses Shaw's dry interjections sometimes, the way she would so casually say something violent that scandalized Finch and then turn around and become a huge softy around Bear, even though he would never call her that to her face. (She'd probably shoot him.)

He misses Root, in a weird way that goes against all of his instincts, because she hurt Finch and Shaw before, and he can't quite trust her, and she seems a little... insane from time to time (most of the time), but then he might be just a little hypocritical because he suspects that they might all be considered not-exactly-sane by most people's standards. And Shaw seems to like her. Occasionally.

He misses Finch most of all, the way his voice would seemingly always be in his ear, the helping hand out of any sticky situation. (Not this one, he thinks bitterly, before he shuts his brain up because it's unfair, it's not like Harold didn't try.) (He should've let us kill the senator, the ex-agent part of his brain suggests. It might at least have slowed Decima down, but he shuts that thought down even more violently than the one before, because that way lays madness.)

He thinks about the skeptical eyebrow Finch used to lift in the beginning, when John brought him his tea the first few times, as if he thought John might try to drug him and he misses the way that skepticism turned into warm appreciation and trust during the last few years. He misses the walks or the few times, rare and far in-between, when they did something just for the fun of it – watch a movie, get some food.

He thinks about all the secrets he never got to poke at Harold for, the sarcastic little remarks he never got to make, the dry jokes he never got to see Harold's answering smirk for and he curses Decima and mourns what is lost and doesn't know what to do with himself.

-

She wants to find that asshole who's responsible for all this and shoot him. She wants to sneak Bear food and get his fur all over her clothes because he sheds like hell and she never resists petting him anyway, and she wants to make Finch look at her all pinched because she said something he doesn't approve of, and she wants to poke fun at Reese and she wants her strange flirty hate-thing with Root back, and she wants to stab that dumb customer who can't decide between two lipsticks of the same fucking color with her stiletto.

She feels a lot like when Cole died. She thinks this must be what loss feels like.

It feels an awful lot like wanting to shoot someone.  
  
-

The machine is quiet. She thinks she's working on something.

She hopes so, at least, because this is just awful, and what's an Analog Interface without a function? Useless, that's what it is. There's not even anyone around to poke fun at.

\---

Harold doesn't code anything during the first three months after they've started running. It's irrational, but every time he sits down he feels like this is exactly what led them to where they are now and he can't.

He doesn't really need the laptop anyway. He's teaching now, and he doesn't need coding for that.

He doesn't touch the laptop once during the three months.

It feels like he's trying to breathe water.

-

Being a cop should be easy after what he did before, but it's not. He's too fast, too sharp, like a sword in a pile of butter knives, and even when he tries to fit in he stands out.

When he walks into the police station he's reminded of Carter and wants to leave and never come back.

He doesn't, because if he stays here, maybe Harold will find him once it will not place all of them in mortal danger.

-

She is so,  _so_ close to stabbing her boss with a pen when Root walks in and smiles at her.

She almost stabs Root instead.

_What took her so long?_

-

It's better once she's with Sam again. The Machine still doesn't talk to her, and she's gotten tired of doing nothing. At least this way, she can do something. (Someone, she thinks involuntarily and almost laughs, because that's not what this is.) (Yet.)

Sam seems a little less likely to commit murder on her coworkers and customers as well, so she considers that an improvement of their respective situations.

She thinks that she might actually be able to wait for the Machine to finish whatever she is doing without getting (too) impatient like this. That, of course, is when she gets a call from her for the first time in almost three months.

Sam is skeptical, but Root laughs at her until she agrees to go with her, if only to get the chance to tell her, "I told you so," afterwards.

Root hopes it won't come to that, but the Machine is being oddly quiet again.

\---

John looks tired, he thinks and then immediately feels guilty, because of all of them Miss Shaw is probably the only one who looks the most like she usually does (did). Even if she seems a little angrier. He knows he, himself looks tired as well. He knows he looks it, because he is. He still feels like it's his fault. It probably is. Everything started with his laptop. If he never lays hand on one again, it will still be too soon.

"Come in," he says, like their presence doesn't probably paint a huge bullseye on their backs. But he's tired, and he missed them with a fierceness that surprised even him, right up until it didn't.

John's knuckles are bruised, he notices because apparently in the years they've worked together, Harold has gotten used to checking them instinctively. He wants to know what job the Machine chose for him, but he doesn't know if he has the right to ask.

He doesn't know if he has the right to do anything, right now.

"The Machine sent us here," Root says and Harold is the only one who is surprised, so she'd most likely already told John and Miss Shaw before. Probably to get them to come with her in the first place, he thinks. It makes sense.

"It's still functional?" he asks, and then he feels bad because he's doubting the one thing that can help them out of the situation they've found themselves in (he'd gotten all of them into). But he hasn't heard anything from it in the months since they had to run, and he thought maybe Samaritan had found the servers and they've been destroyed.

Root smiles, but she seems less bright, less convinced, just... less, than he remembers her.

"Have faith, Harold," she says, and he realizes that this is her, slowly losing her own, and that she's probably reminding herself as much as she's reminding him.

This is them, grasping at straws.

He's only just finished the thought when Root's mobile phone buzzes, and she looks at it for only a moment before she raises an eyebrow at him.

"She wants you to get your laptop," she says, and something in him almost, almost balks. It's the part of him that decided not to touch it during the past months, the part in him that thinks he opened Pandora's box when he wrote the first line of code for the Machine.

But it's not just his life that's in danger right now.

He gets the laptop.

"She needs you to change a few things for her," Root says, and it takes Harold a moment to understand just what she actually means by that.

"I can't-" he starts automatically, and Root smiles and it shuts him up.

"She can do what she wants, so she's giving you permission to change her. She wants _you_ to do it."

He doesn't think about why the Machine wants him to do it and not Root. Then he tries not to think what might happen if the Machine chose to give that kind of access to another person. The wrong person. It didn't. (Unless he's the wrong person. He chooses to forget that thought as soon as he has it.) (Only he doesn't.)

"Why is it not doing that on its own, anyway?" Shaw asks, and Harold doesn't look up to see Root's face as she answers, but that's mostly because she doesn't, not really.

"It'd go against her nature," she says.

Harold finds out what she means soon enough. He tries not to think about what he's doing while he changes code and watches the Machine adapt around it.

It's strangely organic, life-like, he finds himself thinking, and he feels faintly sick.

-

Finch looks like he hates what he's doing, he thinks. Not that John understands the code he's writing at the moment. Just a moment ago he tried to get a look at it, but it's not like anything he's ever seen before and he thinks that maybe Finch invented a completely new programming language for the Machine way back when.

So he watches and he doesn't know what's happening, but Root looks bitter, and Finch looks pained, and Shaw looks blank, so she's probably as confused as he is. It can't be good. But then, it can't get worse than it is right now, and while he doesn't trust Root, he _does_ trust Finch.

He doesn't let Finch out of his sight for more than five minutes at a time. Even then he leaves almost solely to see if someone's waiting to shoot them yet. Mostly because John's only just gotten him back and he doesn't particularly want him to get killed.

Nobody comes to get them and for a moment John wonders just what Samaritan is focusing all its computational power on nowadays.

-

`Admin: ~$ start breakthrough`  
`Starting BREAKTHROUGH...`  
`Integrating code... Done`  
`Code integration successful`

-

"Now we wait," Root says and she sounds almost cheerful, but not really, and Shaw would kind of like to shoot her because she still doesn't know what she's planning.

She doesn't smile when Root looks at her (mostly because it's obvious that she has some kind of plan to get them out of their precarious living situation, and Sam hates being out of the loop with this), but Root must see... something in her face anyway, because her smile doesn't falter at all.

"You'll see, she'll fix this," Root says. She sounds so certain, Shaw almost believes her.

-

She doesn't know exactly what the machine intends to do. She can imagine, but she isn't sure. She is also not entirely certain it will work, but she hopes so.

For Harold's, John's and Sam's sake, if nothing else.

\-----

The code is integrated, and his work is done. Getting the Machine to accept it had been his job, that's all.

He worries, thinking about why the Machine thought it would be necessary for him to write the code, when there had been nothing about it that it couldn't do on its own. Except, if... oh.

"Well, that explains some things," he says, partly to himself, partly to the room at large, but mostly to the Machine.

Root turns away and looks sad. When Sam looks at him questioningly, he shakes his head and stares at the success message in the terminal.

-

Sam brings her a candy bar and says it's breakfast. It should be a reminder of that one time Root did the same thing and get a smile out of her, she knows, but she can't get more than a quiet, "thank you," to leave her lips.

She feels like she's gearing up for the loss of a loved one. In some way, that's probably true.

-

A week later, a fault in the electrical lines shorts out half of New York's security cameras and people complain about not being able to make calls on their mobile phones.

Most of the phones start working again a few days later, but the cameras need to be replaced. Harold and Root know what happened, and by that point, Shaw and John suspect that the Machine did something. They don't yet know that the "fault" was actually a virus that attacked Samaritan and fried everything that contained it after the virus really got to work.

-

`GOODBYE ADMIN`

-

John glances at Finch's laptop in passing, and stops short on his way to get a water bottle.

"Why did the Machine say goodbye?" he asks, because he knows that's who must have been the sender. Finch has hardly opened other programs than the prompt box for the Machine during the time they've been here. It's a foregone conclusion.

Finch's mouth twists almost bitterly. Root makes a noise that almost sounds hurt, and it makes Sam look at her in what he'd almost think is concern. John watches Finch.

"Samaritan was looking for the Machine," he says slowly, "I think it decided to... sacrifice itself, you might say."

"What? _How_?" asks Sam, and it's Root who answers.

"She asked Harold to write a virus for her – her survival instinct wouldn't have let her do it herself. When Samaritan infiltrated her programming, it was uploaded there. It corrupted the programming and then it fried whatever parts of Samaritan it could."

"And a few other things," Sam adds, because now the cameras and non-working mobile phones make sense.

"What about the Machine?" John asks, because there's something they're missing. Harold and Root look so sad.

"Well, she couldn't exactly upload the virus without being affected herself. Samaritan would have _noticed_ ," Root bites out, and oh.

Oh.

-

All is not automatically well after Samaritan crashes and burns – literally. There's news reports about company buildings catching fire because of "cooling problems". That's not what they were. The virus successfully infiltrated the system that kept the servers cooled and with them on a fritz, they overheated and literally caught fire.

Decima had it coming for thinking Samaritan didn't need anyone to watch over its parts, with it being damn-near omnipotent, Sam thinks.

They still drift from city to city for a while. For all they've apparently permanently disabled Samaritan (or the Machine has, anyway), they've still got Decima's people after them. Even more so now than before, probably, what with them being at fault for Samaritan's destruction.

But they'll handle that, she thinks. People are easy, now that they've more or less successfully evaded a being with millions of eyes and ears.

\---

`Reboot initialized... Done`  
`Reboot successful`

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even know if this fic makes sense to someone other than me. Basically, I watched almost all of POI in about two weeks and by the end of it I was drowning in feelings. So I decided to puke them everywhere. These are my feelings. This was also finished for over a week before I could get myself to decide I'd finished editing, because it's not going to get better. If there's still mistakes, please tell me, I'll fix them. (I also need to check if the Machine was shown to have input prompts and maybe change them in this, if they're different.)
> 
> I could actually see POI ending with the destruction of the Machine, and also with Reese's and Finch's deaths, because that would close the circle back to the beginning, where Finch said that they'd probably both die doing what they do. For this fic, I couldn't actually bring myself to kill them, though. Mostly because I would have cried. (Even if the title would've made more sense.)
> 
> This did also not fix my feelings about... basically almost all of S3, I'm still sad.


End file.
